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Heroin addict turned filmmaker changes perceptions of life in the Downtown Eastside

Filmmaker Andy Fiore, winner of the 2013 Courage to Come Back Award in the mental-health category, is an advocate for residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Photograph by: Nick Procaylo, PNG
, The Province

This is the third of six profiles on recipients of the 2013 Courage to Come Back Awards, presented by Coast Mental Health to six outstanding people who have overcome great obstacles to give back to their communities. Their inspiring comebacks will be celebrated at a gala dinner at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre on April 25.

Andy Fiore grew up seeing strange visions and hearing things that others couldn't but he just figured it was an active imagination.

And while attending Ryerson University (then Polytechnic Institute) in Toronto, he remembers seeing a gold towering building while driving on Spadina Avenue, a hallucination so real he almost got out of his car to ask the other motorists if they saw it, too.

Fiore was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia but not before a slide into heroin addiction on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He's since rebounded and works as an independent filmmaker who tells the stories of residents of the impoverished neighbourhood, a journey that earned him a 2013 Courage to Come Back Award in the mental-health category.

After Fiore graduated in 1999 from Ryerson's radio and TV arts program, he moved to Korea to teach English. But within two weeks of arriving, "everything in my mind fell apart."

He had major difficulties getting around on the subway, and the culture shock and foreign food was overwhelming. He thought he was being followed everywhere.

He returned to Canada and when his father came to collect him from the airport, "I thought he was trying to kill me. I thought all the people around me were trying to kill me," Fiore said in his East Vancouver apartment that doubles as a studio for his film company.

A doctor gave him medication and told him he may have suffered a brief psychotic episode.

Fiore's father didn't believe he was mentally ill and suggested he had been drugged in Korea.

He stopped taking the drugs after 30 days and got a job.

"But I was still hearing things and still seeing things," he said.

He started taking heroin and was smoking pot, drugs the doctors warned him against because they could have been causing a chemical imbalance in his brain.

But they quieted the voices and Fiore went from snorting to injecting heroin and soon had five arrest warrants for various property crimes he committed to keep him in his habit.

The street drugs also eased his back pain from a motorcycle accident and a permanent gastrointestinal disorder.

"I thought this was how I was going to live my life, as a closet heroin addict," he said. "Closet heroin addicts are common in Toronto. Here it's out in the open."

He moved to Vancouver in 2001 and went directly to the Downtown Eastside, renting the only thing he could afford, a single-room-occupancy suite.

"Very soon, I figured out how to get heroin," he said, and was committing crimes, going in and out of jail and "not really on my meds."

He was eventually properly diagnosed, including for depression, and put on the drugs he's still on today, and Fiore met his partner, who helped him to see the insanity of his behaviour.

He said when he lived alone, he'd go off his meds and if it wasn't for his girlfriend's support, "I'd be sitting in a corner drooling."

Fiore also went into treatment for his addiction in 2006 and takes methadone.

He works producing documentaries, including a number that tell what it's like to live on the Downtown Eastside through the eyes of those who live there. The films are shown to university students and at-risk youths to let them know what a life of addiction is really like.

"I completely understand the people there (on the Downtown Eastside)," he said. "There are a lot of people living down there who have undiagnosed mental illness and they don't know it, just like I didn't know it."

His film work has also led to him being invited to speak to high schools to share his story of his mental illness.

"If you can help one person, that's great," he said.

"And the speaking engagements also show people that even if you have a disability, you can actually have a successful life."

He's honoured to win the award, and was pleased after reading the recommendations, including one from Surrey youth worker Adair Bastin that said Fiore's "struggle to become mentally healthy has inspired him to make a difference in the lives of everyone else who struggles with a mental illness," Fiore said: "This is what people really think of me?"

He's happy to change perceptions of the mentally ill.

"We're not scary, we're like everybody else. We want to love and work."

And to live lives free of addiction. "I truly believe 99 per cent of the people trapped in that life want to quit (using drugs). I kept hearing I really wish I could quit, I really want to quit."

Fiore's said his new high comes from working out on a training machine set up on his balcony and is looking forward to the screening in June of his next film, called 100 Block, about living near Main and Hastings streets.

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